


Ever After

by piedpiper



Category: Maleficent (2014)
Genre: Domestic, Family Fluff, Multi, Post-Canon, Threesome - F/F/M, chosen family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 17:39:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1826632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piedpiper/pseuds/piedpiper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what the stories don't tell you...</p><p>Aurora discovers about three days after her second coronation ceremony and two days into Prince Philip's official diplomatic stay that the boy was actually much more pleasant when he was lost in the woods.</p><p>(Written for a friend. <i>Clearly</i> the only acceptable ending to all these events is for Aurora and Maleficent and Diaval to go off together and be a domestic fluffy threesome family.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ever After

**Author's Note:**

> This was intended to be a short drabble that I wrote for my friend after we went to see _Maleficent_ together and decided that fluffy domestic threesomes are clearly how this movie was supposed to end. Somehow it took me almost two weeks to produce this, probably because Disney and threesomes are not my usual fare. But there's no way that my friend and I are the only two who came to this conclusion by the end of the movie, so here's a thing for all the Maloraval shippers out there.

This is what the stories don't tell you...  


Aurora discovers about three days after her second coronation ceremony and two days into Prince Philip's official diplomatic stay that the boy was actually much more pleasant when he was lost in the woods.

"Boys are awful, dear," Maleficent tells Aurora when she stomps up to her through the long grass to complain, more annoyed than downcast. "The sooner you accept that, the easier the rest of your life will be."

Yes, Aurora thinks about pointing out, since she found out that the man who was technically her father chopped off her fairy godmother's wings, went insane, and ended up getting dropped off the top of a castle for his efforts, she has more or less gotten that message. Instead she just sighs and pushes her dress to one side so she can sit down next to Maleficent. They're on the edge of the cliff by the cottage; Aurora's been spending all the time she can there lately, even though the officials that swarmed out of the woodwork after she became queen want her to stay in the castle all the time. She hates its dark, gloomy halls, and since she's _queen_ (no, really, she still can't quite believe how that happened), she's asserting her newfound power to spend her time wherever she pleases.

"He said he wants to build a palace in the Moors," Aurora grumps. "And he said he wants to marry me. This _fall_. I'm only sixteen. I don't want to get married to anyone. And besides, I don't even _know_ him."

"Tell him to go jump off a tower," Maleficent says, and grins. Aurora laughs, because they're only just reaching the point where they can laugh uncomfortably at that. And if the first woman's smile fades a little too fast and her eyes turn distant... well. They all have a lot on their minds right now.

Aurora does not tell Philip to jump off a tower, as it turns out, but she does tell him something less rude but still firm the next day. He acts heartbroken in what Aurora judges to be a fairly stupid puppy-dog way. Philip is handsome and charming – it's probably a requirement for a prince – but Aurora knows an actual bird who is a more interesting conversationalist than him, and Philip sees the fairy lands as something to be tamed and showcased rather than admired and let be. And, well. _He_ couldn't wake her up, could he. True love theirs is not; it's barely even false love.

They part on good terms in any case, and he tells her he'll return in a few years on another official state visit. Aurora rules two kingdoms and has no need of marrying into another, but she is done with war.

She spends some days in the castle, putting things right for the people of the human lands as best as she can, but more time in the Moors and the fields by the cottage with Maleficent and Diaval. Now that the walls of thorns have come down, the boundaries between human and fairy kingdoms are dissolving, and citizens of the two lands are beginning to venture out from their own territories into others. There are gnomes living on the cliffside of the cottage already, and fairies in the grass. They're all Aurora's friends and playmates, but at the end of the evenings there are always two people she comes back to.

Aurora had never had a family before she met the two people who had spent her whole life watching over her from afar. Her three aunts had been – well, amazingly bad at being aunts, which made sense in hindsight. Diaval had brought her up at least as much as they had, but he had been a _bird_ at the time, and it had been... not the same. But now, in the fairy-lamp-lit nights of early autumn, she sometimes finds herself dozing off against a strong, scarred, human side, or waking up folded warmly in the dark brown feathers of someone else's wings, and she feels warm new emotions in her chest that make her wonder things she never has before.

Because what they are to one another, the three of them, is changing. Something snapped into place in the castle on the day of her sixteenth birthday, when Aurora was sleeping and Diaval was begging and Maleficent was racing fate to avert her own curse, or when Maleficent was exacting revenge the way she maybe should have in the first place and Diaval was paying back his debt once and for all and Aurora put her shoulder to the glass cabinet and watched everything she'd thought she had to be crash to the ground along with the case that had trapped her fairy godmother's wings.

She'd grabbed a dropped sword she could hardly lift, afterwards, and screamed at the soldiers who thought that slaying the dragon was the right thing to do to _stand down_. And they'd listened to her because she was the crown princess. She remembered the men milling around in confusion as she had vaulted on Diaval's back and they'd half-flown, half-crashed out the window and down to the courtyard where King Stefan's body lay sprawled at Maleficent's feet. The fairy's eyes had been blank and dazed when she turned to look at them, but she'd managed a little smile when she'd seen them. A lot of other things had happened later on that very long day, but what Aurora remembers is the three of them standing in that courtyard over the dead king with their arms around one another's shoulders. 

They never talked about it, but somehow, there it is. Maleficent _listens_ to Diaval now, and asks permission before she changes his shape, and Diaval looks back at her with concern and affection and small private smiles and very little fear. They exchange a lot of quiet amiable sidelong glances, two not-quite-humans who only took the better part of twenty years to find out all the personality and all the demons they had in common. They fall asleep in the tops of trees with their arms around each other, and do barrel rolls together as they fly at breakneck speeds through the tall rocks of the Moors and dive off cliffs to catch each other, screaming with laughter over the wind. And Aurora... 

Aurora was told, once, that part of her curse was that everyone she met would fall in love with her. But then again, part of the curse was also that she would never be sad, and the events around her sixteenth birthday certainly disproved that. So she's not terribly concerned about this love's lack of legitimacy. She knows how each of the other two look at her when they think she doesn't notice, and she thinks she just might be doing the same thing back at them. Diaval is sarcastic and crookedly pretty and braver than he was supposed to be and watches her without flinching when she traces the scars on his chest with her fingertips. And Maleficent is... Maleficent is still sad sometimes and doesn't want Aurora to see, Maleficent laughs with her eyes and uses her wings for _everything_ and shows the people she loves nonstop tiny gestures of affection because she doesn't know how to show large ones yet. Maleficent is complicated and wonderful and beautiful and _Maleficent._ Aurora's been a little bit in love with her all her life, she thinks now. They were going to live together forever, Aurora had decided before everything fell apart, and now that everything is back together she actually gets to.

She moves officially to the cottage on the cliffside the day she turns seventeen. The counselors argue and complain about court sessions and tradition, but to tell the truth, for a ruler of two very different lands it's a good compromise. Set in between the harsh walls and bad memories of the castle and the wildness of the Moors that still frightens most humans, Aurora can take care of both worlds with equal ease. And more than that, she _likes_ the cottage. It feels like home, and though she still loves the outdoors and their folk, she is beginning to see the advantages in having a warm kitchen and a roof to invite people under out of the rain.

Her old bed is a bonus too, big enough for lying three across at night. On the autumn and winter nights when wolves howl and the air is too cold to lie outside on beds of moss, Aurora sleeps warm between two wild, barefoot creatures and knows she will be safe from any harm. There are sharp-nosed kisses and soft-lipped kisses and the murmur across the room as she dozes off of Maleficent and Diaval evening the ground between them, and this is her family. Diaval is learning how to cook, Maleficent is learning how to trust people, and Aurora is getting _really good_ at deflecting her counselors' questions about marriage.

They start calling her the Maiden Queen for that eventually. Which, well, not _exactly_ true at this point, but Aurora appreciates the private humor of good irony. She answers the counselors' worries about an heir by telling them she will find and appoint someone worthy, never fear. She'll do it better than the king before her father did, too. And in any case, she might just be around for longer than they think.

(She did think about what it would be like to have a little raven-haired baby at one point, a child they could all raise together and share this new, better world with. But that would be too complicated to explain to the officials, and she's not doing anything they can't all officially do together.)

And so this is how it goes: they watch sunrises and wrestle each other in the grass and fly with personal or borrowed wings and stain their fingers purple picking berries in the clearings and make bread in the kitchen and fall asleep nestled together in front of the fire, and Maleficent calls Aurora _beastie_ and Aurora calls Diaval _pretty bird_ and Diaval calls Maleficent _Maleficent_ , which is better than any other name she could devise. And it might not look like the paintings and the stories, but Aurora thinks it's better than any of the stories could ever be.

And they do, in fact, live happily ever after.

  



End file.
